Fear Factor: Rat Smoothie Anyone?

Even if you’ve never seen a single episode of Fear Factor, you know that it’s the show in which contestants are more often than not challenged to eat really disgusting things like cow testicles and Madagascar hissing cockroaches (those were a show favorite). But the show seemed to cross the already blurred line of grotesqueness when a January 2005 episode featured a blender — full of rats. The episode incited criticism and even a lawsuit in which a man from Ohio sued NBC for $2.5 million in damages, saying that the rat-blender incident caused him to get dizzy, run into a wall and vomit. The suit was dismissed.